I have a wall mounted remote-style switch and a couple dimmer outlets that I have an association for. I was able to get those set up through HA without too much difficulty though it took a bit of time to figure the UI and such out. Now I have it working that when I hit the switch button the two lamps turn on.
But I still can’t get that to show in HA itself as a single thing and though I can get the two dimmer outlets to show up, their state is not reflected when I hit the button. It seems like it shouldn’t be very hard to create some element that reflects the association group and lets me control it too.
Like, I hit the button when I walk through the door, the lights turn on and if I look at HA it shows “a light” as on. If I want, I can then turn that light off in HA and both lamps turn off.
I just can’t seem to find how to do this so I suspect that I’m just missing some search terminology to help me find it.
You need to understand the nature of Z-wave associations… the proper/full name is Z-wave direct associations. This allows a Z-wave device to control another Z-wave device via a Z-wave group communication and bypass the controller, meanings your HA system could be offline and it would still work.
Newer Z-wave devices will provide status updates to the controller if they are changed locally or via another z-wave device.
You need to list the models of your remote switch and the outlet it is controlling to see what is possible/viable in terms of status updating the controller/HA.
Yea. I think I understand how they work. It doesn’t seem like it’s not functionally different than the zwave enabled regular switches I have with lights hooked up to them directly. If I flip the switch the light changes and reflects the new state in HA and I can hit the HA button and it flips again. If HA isn’t available, the light still turns on even if HA can’t notice that it is. This is essentialy what I want to have the association look like.
I have a Nortek security remote switch WA00Z-1 and two GE ZW3103 dimmer plugs. But honestly, this doesn’t feel like it should hinge on that.
The debug log shows the group messages coming in so it feels like I can some how abstract that to the two lights.
Ok, I did some research and it seems those dimmer modules are being controlled from the Nortek switch (you’re using some old tech here) via Group 2.
And easy fix which should hopefully work is simply go to the association you setup and add the controller (node1) to it. So whenever the remote button sends an on/off command to the dimmer, it should also update the controller.
Hrm. That doesn’t seem to be enough to simply work. But I’m still working on it.
Yea, it’s older tech. I got it years ago and had a different controller for it originally. Recently I decided to change to HA and didn’t want to buy all new hardware to make it work.
The older 100-series zwave devices become an albatross after a while. I had some Nortek wall switches but eventually got rid of them for two reasons, the first being that they did not provide instant status when they were changed locally or by something other than the controller, so that meant having to poll them on cyclic basis just to know if they were on or off. The second reason was because they eventually become a fire hazard and were flickering the load.
Any newer zwave device will give instant status when its state changes. Sometimes it’s worth biting the bullet and slowly replacing the old ones. I started replacing my old switches with Zooz or Jasco/Enbrighten whenever they are on sale for around $25 each. Not only will you get a device that behaves properly, but you also get multi-click events that can be used for automations and controlling multiple devices.